Tiny Tower

I’ve never played Farmville or any of that sort of Facebook game. Scott mentioned Tiny Tower, an iOS game that had just been released last week, and I quickly dismissed it as more of the same. You set up tasks that take time to complete and you either go away and come back later or you use currency to speed things up— currency that can be purchased with real world currency.

Then, last Wednesday, I quit my job. (Don’t worry, I have another one lined up.) The following day my wife left town, gone for six days. I sat in my apartment, alone, jobless. I downloaded Tiny Tower.

My first two floors

Tiny Tower is a little bit like Sim Tower. You build an increasingly-taller tower, populating its floors with businesses and apartments. People move in, businesses sell products, businesses run out of products. You decide who gets to stay in the apartments and where those people work (They all work in the tower. They never leave the tower. Until you evict them from the tower) and you decide what goods or services the businesses “stock”. Only one item can be restocked at a time, and the more expensive an item is, the longer it takes to restock. By employing your businesses with tenants who are particularly good at the given market that a business is in, you gain more efficiency and make more money.

These people will do in a pinch, I guess…

This is the first part where Tiny Tower gets weird. You have these people moving in, right? But sometimes, they’re not particularly great at anything. You’re not going to keep them around, are you? They’re deadweight. They’re bringing the rest of the tower down. If you just evict them, with the click of a single button on their profile sheet, you’ll create more room in the apartments and available jobs for more talented people. With more talented people, you’ll be able to generate money more quickly, and the tower will grow more quickly. It’s just good for the community. No hard feelings, right?

Poor bastards. Never had a chance.

You have a few currency-generating options that serve as busywork between product restocking times: shuttling people to different floors via the elevator and finding specific tenants for a variety of purposes.

When you shuttle people to different floors, you generally do just that: someone hops into the elevator and tell you a floor number and you control an elevator that takes them where they want to go. You generate a small amount of coins, presumably representing the assistance that you gave in helping them reach the business they wanted to get to (although I’m not sure how all the other customers are getting there— up an invisible set of stairs, maybe? And why do some people want to be taken to stores that are currently out of all products or construction sites?)

Every once in a while, you’re alerted that a different breed of person is waiting in the elevator lobby. These “VIPs” bestow special powers upon your ability to gain money or speed up time-consuming processes. Looking a little bit deeper, they break down into producers (construction workers and deliverypeople) and consumers (celebrities and “big spenders”). There’s an obvious imbalance in the value we place on these people, though— celebrities and big spenders are almost always valuable in some way; as long as you have at least one shop with stuff in it it’s worthwhile to send that person to the shop and collect the resulting cashflow.

For producers, though, you need to have a circumstance where they can actually help you— if a construction worker shows up, it can cut the time spent building a new floor in half for me right now, but if I’m not quite ready to build a new floor, I’ll just make them wait in the elevator on the ground floor. Producers are expected to patiently wait for me to need them and they’ll stay there as long as I want them to, waiting to be put to use. The lesson here is that consumers are always welcome; producers create new problems just to put their talents to use.

The other event that fills up your time, as mentioned earlier, is being asked to locate people in your building. This task itself is layered with all kinds of amazing messages— for one, the implication that this would be a hard task. I house and employ these (at the time of this writing) 45 people; of course I would know where they live and work and be able to find them quickly; right? Ha! Fat chance. Instead I run up and down the tower, looking for the most discerning feature of the photo given to me (thank god they show you a photo); hopefully this person is currently wearing a dumb hat. That’ll help.

The other concern with this “find the tenant” game, is, of course, the privacy issue. A lot of the missions are harmless. “A pizza delivery is here.” “A box of kittens is being dropped off.” “A long-lost relative is here to reconnect.” Hold on a second. How do I even know that this person is telling the truth? Couldn’t it be a bookie, a stalker, a serial killer? Why am I aiding these people? Then, of course, there’s the bombshell.

FIVE OH! FIVE OH IN THE YARD!

The worst part about this happening in my building? I helped the police find Leslie. And then, after it was done, they tipped me a “tower buck”. I felt dirty immediately. Why did I do that to poor Leslie? And yet… what if he was involved in something dirty? All those people who take the elevator up to the construction site and then just disappear? And the police didn’t even do anything about him! He’s working in my video store right now!

I’ll be right back; I’ve got a criminal to evict. Then maybe I’ll restock a few businesses…

—Casey

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